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(WIP = Work in Progress)

(And, no, I’m not tired of cheesy titles yet.  Shush.)

What was that I was saying about things taking so much longer than you think they will?

Finally, finally, finally got the Sew Together Bag done tonight.  Which I want to use on our long weekend that starts tomorrow.  The Summit Pack that I was hoping to finish, too?  Haven’t even cut the interfacing for it yet.

I obviously need to either lower my expectations or sew a LOT faster than I do now.

Anyway,  the bag is finished and it is super cool.

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I love the way this comes together, but I’m afraid I did not love the pattern.  It’s listed as a “beginner” pattern, but I wouldn’t advise a beginner to come anywhere near it.  And not because it’s so complex–it really isn’t–but because there are so few pictures to illustrate the steps, and the pictures that are in the pattern don’t actually show what you need them to.  I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out if I hadn’t made so many zipper pouches (particularly this one) and bound so many quilts.  I was just reading the reviews of the pattern on Craftsy and the designer recommended to someone an online sew-along for step-by-step pictures.  Really, those should have been included in the pattern.

That said, though, there were a couple of choices I made here that made my life more difficult.  For one thing, I used bigger, beefier zippers than the designer used to make her sample, so I had to recut my zipper tabs to fit.  (I have this horror of little wimpy coil zippers, I suspect due to a couple of rather traumatic wardrobe malfunctions in high school–I carried safety pins around with me for years afterward.)

I also INSISTED–knowing full well that I would probably regret it–on using pinwale corduroy for the linings of my zipper pouches.  It’s about the lightest corduroy you’ve ever seen, but it’s still thicker than quilting cotton.

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But that green!  You see why it had to be done, don’t you??

That’s probably why I had such trouble sewing the binding on the sides.  The trusty (or at least trusty up to that point) Kenmore was NOT having it and jammed rather spectacularly three or four times.  (I am now intimately familiar with its bobbin mechanism.)  The wimpy White just barely handled it, but the whole drama ate up a lot of time and caused some unnecessary grumpiness.

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4.5 long pull coil zipper.  Tough beasties.

I think the bigger zipper was also the reason I wasn’t able to machine sew the tabs down on the bag as instructed.  There just was no room to get that part of the bag under the foot with that wide, stiff zipper in the way.  I wound up hand sewing the tabs down as securely as I could.  If they don’t hold, we’ll have to come up with a plan B, but they look pretty sturdy right now.

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In the end, though, I came out of it with a very ingeniously-designed bag that I think will fit my traveling stuff nicely.  And it’s GREEN, which is obviously very important.

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STH